One of the great intellectuals of post-1989 Europe gives his verdict on what happened when the Berlin Wall fell and communism finally collapsed

In Search of Lost Meaning: The New Eastern Europe. By Adam Michnik. University of California Press; 248 pages; $29.95 and £20.95. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

AFTER the velvet revolution came the scratchy transformation: 50 years of undigested trauma spilling over into a world of new rules and old enemies. The woes and worries of the post-communist era, and their roots in the region's past, are the subject of a powerful collection of essays by Adam Michnik, the editor of a leading Warsaw daily and a well-known east European intellectual.

As a Polish dissident Mr Michnik was one of communism's most formidable foes. He went on to found a media empire and became a towering presence on the post-1989 landscape. Vaclav Havel, his friend and Czech counterpart, calls him the “intellectual conscience of the Polish nation”. The ten essays in this book appeared first in the author's newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza. The first four deal with anniversaries: the founding of Solidarity in 1980, the imposition of martial law in 1981, the collapse of communism in 1989 and Hungary's doomed uprising in 1956. Mr Michnik disentangles their perceived significance at the time, and the role they serve today, taking in also events elsewhere in the region. Then he turns to the rancid climate of modern Polish politics, and finally to Polish-Jewish history.

Mr Michnik's cultural and literary expertise are well displayed. He writes with insight and authority about the giants of Polish literature, Adam Mickiewicz from the 19th century and Czeslaw Milosz, the Nobel-prize winning poet who died in 2004. He weaves their lives and writings into a compelling story of dilemmas, courage, dignity and defiance. The reader is quickly transported to the Warsaw of the 1960s, where the allegories of Mickiewicz's play, “Forefathers' Eve”, expressed resistance against communist censorship.

The author's chief message is to try to promote a clear-headed view of the past for “idealists without illusions”. He decries the simple narrative in which Polish patriots are paragons of virtue, and their Bolshevik persecutors the epitome of evil. He highlights, for example, the shocking story of the first president of post-1918 Poland, Gabriel Narutowicz. This brainy and inspirational Lithuanian-born, Swiss-educated engineer prompted an outbreak of bewildering hysteria. Cursed as a cosmopolitan, a puppet of Jews and Freemasons, and an atheist, the hapless head of state was assassinated by a nationalist zealot after only five days in office.

For Mr Michnik the stench of the “gutter” (or the “septic tank” as he also calls it) pervades Polish politics, in the ultra- nationalism of the inter-war years, and in the venomous stance of the post-war communist regime towards reconciliation with Germany (a cause bravely promoted by the Catholic church under Karol Wojtyla, later the first Polish pope). It continues, he believes, in modern politics. One feature is the use of smears. These typically involve a public figure's real or alleged collaboration with the communist secret police. Another is vitriolic denunciation of the “Round Table” talks, which brought about the peaceful end of communist rule. Why, he asks, are these now seen as “malicious conspiracy and high treason”?

The answer, he says, is a “strange national nihilism” in which disasters are celebrated and triumphs denigrated. The Warsaw uprising of 1944, one of the greatest catastrophes in Polish history, gets a much better press than Poland's role in destroying the evil empire. “Why are Poles unable to take pride in what was magnificent and brave, wise and rational, and accomplished before the eyes of the entire world. Can Poles only worship the defeated, the fallen and the murdered?”

Mr Michnik's record as an anti-communist (he was first jailed at the age of 18 and has spent six years of his life in prison) gives him the right to be generous towards former foes. He believes former communists should be treated as normal politicians, not moral lepers. He also believes that good actions can redeem bad ones: for example, he defends General Czeslaw Kiszczak, the chief of security at the time of martial law (and responsible for abominable repressions) because as interior minister a few years later he allowed the Round Table talks to give Polish communism a bloodless burial.

Perhaps most controversially he praises Poland's last communist leader, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, for his “admirable courage” in accepting responsibility for imposing martial law in 1981. Mr Michnik sees that decision in retrospect as probably the least bad of the available options: it would have done Poland no good, he argues, to repeat the Hungarian uprising of 1956. His reflections on the pogroms of Jews at the hands of their fellow Poles in Jedwabne under Nazi occupation and at Kielce after the war are piercingly well-judged.

Some might see Mr Michnik now as the epitome of the Warsaw liberal establishment. But in his own eyes he is once again a dissident: someone who is a little ill at ease with the materialism of post-communist capitalism, and deeply out of sympathy with the vengeful historical triumphalism of the national-patriotic camp, exemplified by the Kaczynski twins (Lech Kaczynski, Poland's late president, perished in a plane crash in April 2010; Jaroslaw is leader of the main opposition party).

A weakness of the book is its apocalyptic tone. This can add a touch of urgency to a newspaper column penned during a nasty crisis, but can seem overdone in retrospect. Mr Michnik says at one point he watches “with despair” the “increasing lack of clarity and obliteration of the border between truth and lies”. Polish public debate can indeed be overheated, but in his denunciation of it, Mr Michnik risks falling victim to the hysteria he bemoans.

It is worth remembering that Poland is not actually run by the people he criticises and that in most eyes the country is a great success story, with a booming economy, strong government and friendly ties with its neighbours. Rarely if ever have things looked better. One question Mr Michnik asks is “why are Poles so angry?” His analysis of the pathological discontent of some of his compatriots is interesting but the real answer is that many—probably most—are not angry at all.

For all its (often uncomfortable) insights, the book is frustratingly ill-edited. It lacks dates. The skimpy glossary is of little help. Readers who did not spend the last 20 years following the twists and turns of Polish politics will need to concentrate hard to grasp who knifed whom, when and why. Mr Michnik was writing mainly for Polish readers and it shows. The translation is patchy in places too. A crucial phrase in the biggest scandal in Poland's modern politics is grupa trzymajaca wladze. For some reason this is rendered as the “power-yielding group”. It should be the “power-wielding group”. That's a big difference. The author's scrupulous wordsmithery deserves better.